Chapter One

Andy Will Fight His Way in the World

Christmas 1828 should have been the happiest of seasons at the Hermitage,
Jackson’s plantation twelve miles outside Nashville. It was a week before the
holiday, and Jackson had won the presidency of the United States the month
before. “How triumphant!” Andrew Donelson said of the victory. “How flattering
to the cause of the people!” Now the president- elect’s family and friends were
to be on hand for a holiday of good food, liquor, and wine-Jackson was known to
serve guests whiskey, champagne, claret, Madeira, port, and gin-and, in this
special year, a pageant of horses, guns, and martial glory.

On Wednesday, December 17, 1828, Jackson was sitting inside the house, answering
congratulatory messages. As he worked, friends in town were planning a ball to
honor their favorite son before he left for Washington. Led by a marshal, there
would be a guard of soldiers on horseback to take Jackson into Nashville, fire a
twenty- four- gun artillery salute, and escort him to a dinner followed by
dancing. Rachel would be by his side.

In the last moments before the celebrations, and his duties, began, Jackson
drafted a letter. Writing in his hurried hand across the foolscap, he accepted
an old friend’s good wishes: “To the people, for the confidence reposed in me,
my gratitude and best services are due; and are pledged to their service.”
Before he finished the note, Jackson went outside to his Tennessee fields.

He knew his election was inspiring both reverence and loathing. The 1828
presidential campaign between Jackson and Adams had been vicious. Jackson’s
forces had charged that Adams, as minister to Russia, had procured a woman for
Czar Alexander I. As president, Adams was alleged to have spent too much public
money decorating the White House, buying fancy china and a billiard table. The
anti- Jackson assaults were more colorful. Jackson’s foes called his wife a
bigamist and his mother a whore, attacking him for a history of dueling, for
alleged atrocities in battles against the British, the Spanish, and the
Indians-and for being a wife stealer who had married Rachel before she was
divorced from her first husband. “Even Mrs. J. is not spared, and my pious
Mother, nearly fifty years in the tomb, and who, from her cradle to her death
had not a speck upon her character, has been dragged forth … and held to
public scorn as a prostitute who intermarried with a Negro, and my eldest
brother sold as a slave in Carolina,” Jackson said to a friend.

Jackson’s advisers marveled at the ferocity of the Adams attacks. “The
floodgates of falsehood, slander, and abuse have been hoisted and the most
nauseating filth is poured, in torrents, on the head, of not only Genl Jackson
but all his prominent supporters,” William B. Lewis told John Coffee, an old
friend of Jackson’s from Tennessee.

Some Americans thought of the president-elect as a second Father of His Country.
Others wanted him dead. One Revolutionary War veteran, David Coons of Harpers
Ferry, Virginia, was hearing rumors of ambush and assassination plots against
Jackson. To Coons, Jackson was coming to rule as a tribune of the people, but to
others Jackson seemed dangerous-so dangerous, in fact, that he was worth
killing. “There are a portion of malicious and unprincipled men who have made
hard threats with regard to you, men whose baseness would (in my opinion) prompt
them to do anything,” Coons wrote Jackson.

That was the turbulent world awaiting beyond the Hermitage. In the draft of a
speech he was to deliver to the celebration in town, Jackson was torn between
anxiety and nostalgia. “The consciousness of a steady adherence to my duty has
not been disturbed by the unsparing attacks of which I have been the subject
during the election,” the speech read. Still, Jackson admitted he felt
“apprehension” about the years ahead. His chief fear? That, in Jackson’s words,
“I shall fail” to secure “the future prosperity of our beloved country.” Perhaps
the procession to Nashville and the ball at the hotel would lift his spirits;
perhaps Christmas with his family would.

While Jackson was outside, word came that his wife had collapsed in her sitting
room, screaming in pain. It had been a wretched time for Rachel. She was,
Jackson’s political foes cried, “a black wench,” a “profligate woman,” unfit to
be the wife of the president of the United States. Shaken by the at- tacks,
Rachel-also sixty-one and, in contrast to her husband, short and somewhat
heavy-had been melancholy and anxious. “The enemies of the General have dipped
their arrows in wormwood and gall and sped them at me,” Rachel lamented during
the campaign. “Almighty God, was there ever any thing equal to it?” On the way
home from a trip to Nashville after the balloting, Rachel was devastated to
overhear a conversation about the lurid charges against her. Her niece, the
twenty-one- year- old Emily Donelson, tried to reassure her aunt but failed.
“No, Emily,” Mrs. Jackson replied, “I’ll never forget it!”

When news of her husband’s election arrived, she said: “Well, for Mr. Jackson’s
sake I am glad; for my own part I never wished it.” Now the cumulative toll of
the campaign and the coming administration exacted its price as Rachel was put
to bed, the sound of her cries still echoing in her slave Hannah’s ears.

Jackson rushed to his wife, sent for doctors, did what he could. Later, as she
lay resting, her husband added an emotional postscript to the letter he had
begun: “P.S. Whilst writing, Mrs. J. from good health, has been taken suddenly
ill, with excruciating pain in the left shoulder, arm, and breast. What may be
the result of this violent attack god only knows, I hope for her recovery, and
in haste close this letter, you will pardon any inaccuracies A. J.” Yet his
hopes would not bring her back.

Rachel lingered for two and a half days. Jackson hovered by her side, praying
for her survival. He had loved her for nearly four decades. His solace through
war, politics, Indian fighting, financial chaos, and the vicissitudes of life in
what was then frontier America, Rachel gave him what no one else ever had. In
her arms and in their home he found a steady sense of family, a sustaining
universe, a place of peace in a world of war. Her love for him was
unconditional. She did not care for him because he was a general or a president.
She cared for him because he was Andrew Jackson. “Do not, My beloved Husband,
let the love of Country, fame and honor make you forget you have me,” she wrote
to him during the War of 1812. “Without you I would think them all empty
shadows.” When they were apart, Jackson would sit up late writing to her, his
candle burning low through the night. “My heart is with you,” he told her.

Shortly after nine on the evening of Monday, December 22, three days before
Christmas, Rachel suffered an apparent heart attack. It was over. Still, Jackson
kept vigil, her flesh turning cold to his touch as he stroked her forehead. With
his most awesome responsibilities and burdens at hand, she had left him. “My
mind is so disturbed … that I can scarcely write, in short my dear friend my
heart is nearly broke,” Jackson told his confidant John Coffee after Rachel’s
death.

At one o’clock on Christmas Eve afternoon, by order of the mayor, Nashville’s
church bells began ringing in tribute to Rachel, who was to be buried in her
garden in the shadow of the Hermitage. The weather had been wet, and the dirt in
the garden was soft; the rain made the gravediggers’ task a touch easier as they
worked. After a Presbyterian funeral service led by Rachel’s minister, Jackson
walked the one hundred fifty paces back to the house. A devastated but
determined Jackson spoke to the mourners. “I am now the President elect of the
United States, and in a short time must take my way to the metropolis of my
country; and, if it had been God’s will, I would have been grateful for the
privilege of taking her to my post of honor and seating her by my side; but
Providence knew what was best for her.” God’s was the only will Jackson ever
bowed to, and he did not even do that without a fight.

In his grief, Jackson turned to Rachel’s family. He would not-could not-go to
Washington by himself. Around him at the Hermitage on this bleak Christmas Eve
was the nucleus of the intimate circle he would maintain for the rest of his
life. At the center of the circle, destined both to provide great comfort and to
provoke deep personal anger in the White House, stood Andrew and Emily Donelson.
They had an ancient claim on Jackson’s affections and attention, and they were
ready to serve.

While Andrew-who was also Emily’s first cousin-was to work through the
president- elect’s correspondence, guard access to Jackson, and serve as an
adviser, Emily, not yet twenty- two, would be the president’s hostess. Attracted
by the bright things of the fashionable world and yet committed to family and
faith, Emily was at once selfless and sharp- tongued. Born on Monday, June 1,
1807, the thirteenth and last child of Mary and John Donelson, Emily was raised
in the heart of frontier aristocracy and inherited a steely courage-perhaps from
her grandfather, a Tennessee pioneer and a founder of Nashville-that could verge
on obstinacy. It was a trait she shared with the other women in her family,
including her aunt Rachel. “All Donelsons in the female line,” wrote a family
biographer, “were tyrants.” Charming, generous, and hospitable tyrants, to be
sure, but still a formidable lot-women who knew their own minds, women who had
helped their husbands conquer the wilderness or were the daughters of those who
had. Now one of them, Emily, would step into Rachel’s place in the White House.

On Sunday, January 18, 1829, Jackson left the Hermitage for the capital. With
the Donelsons, William Lewis, and Mary Eastin, Emily’s friend and cousin,
Jackson rode the two miles from the Hermitage to a wharf on a neighboring estate
and boarded the steamboat Pennsylvania to travel the Cumberland River north,
toward their new home. He was, as he had said to the mourners on the day of
Rachel’s burial, the president- elect of the United States.

Before he left Tennessee, he wrote a letter to John Coffee that mixed faith and
resignation. His thoughts were with Rachel, and on his own mortality. “Whether I
am ever to return or not is for time to reveal, as none but that providence, who
rules the destiny of all, now knows,” Jackson said.

His friends hoped that service to the nation would comfort him. “The active
discharge of those duties to which he will shortly be called, more than anything
else, will tend to soothe the poignancy of his grief,” said the NashvilleRepublican and State Gazette in an edition bordered in black in mourning for
Rachel. In a moving letter, Edward Livingston, a friend of Jackson’s and a
future secretary of state, saw that the cause of country would have to replace
Rachel as Jackson’s central concern. Referring to America, Livingston told the
president- elect: “She requires you for her welfare to abandon your just grief,
to tear yourself from the indulgence of regrets which would be a virtue in a
private individual, but to which you are not permitted to yield while so much of
her happiness depends upon your efforts in her service.” Jackson understood. To
rule, one had to survive, and to survive one had to fight.

The travelers wound their way through the country to the capital, passing
through Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, where it snowed. The president-
elect was complaining of sore limbs, a bad cough, and a hand worn out from
greeting so many well- wishers. “He was very much wearied by the crowds of
people that attended him everywhere, anxious to see the People’s President,”
Mary Eastin wrote her father.

Ten days into the voyage, Emily Donelson finally found a moment to sit down. For
her the trip had been a blur of cannons, cheers, and tending to colds-she had
one, as did her little son Jackson. “I scarcely need tell you that we have been
in one continual crowd since we started,” Emily wrote her mother. Their quarters
were overrun by guests, and there were ovations and shouts of joy from people
along the banks of the river. The social demands of the presidency had begun,
really, the moment Jackson and his party left the Hermitage. But Emily was not
the kind to complain, at least not in her uncle’s hearing. She loved the life
that Jackson had opened to her and her husband.

“You must not make yourself unhappy about us, my dear Mother,” Emily added,
sending warm wishes to her father. The handwriting was shaky as the letter
ended; the water was rough, the pace of the craft fast. “I hope you will excuse
this scrawl,” Emily said, “as it is written while the boat is running.”

The speed of the boat did not seem to bother Andrew Jackson, but then he was
accustomed to pressing ahead. He was constantly on the run, and had been all his
life. For him the journey to the White House had begun six decades before, in a
tiny place tucked away in the Carolinas-a place he never visited, and spoke of
only sparingly, called Waxhaw.

Jackson grew up an outsider, living on the margins and at the mercy of others.
Traveling to America from Ireland in 1765, his father, the senior Andrew
Jackson, and his mother, Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson, moved into a tiny
community a few hundred miles northwest of Charleston, in a spot straddling the
border between North and South Carolina. “Waxhaw” came from the name of the
tribe of native Indians in the region, and from a creek that flowed into the
Catawba River. Though the Revolutionary War was eleven years away, the
relationship between King George III and his American colonies was already
strained. The year the Jacksons crossed the Atlantic, Parliament passed the
Quartering Act (which forced colonists to shelter British troops) and the Stamp
Act (which levied a tax on virtually every piece of paper on the continent). The
result: the Massachusetts legislature called for a colonial congress in New
York, which issued a “Declaration of Rights and Grievances” against King George
III. Striking, too, was a remark made by a delegate from South Carolina, the
Jacksons’ new home. “There ought to be no more New England men, no New Yorkers,”
said Christopher Gadsden of Charleston, “but all of us Americans!”

Jackson’s father, meanwhile, was trying to establish himself and his family in
the New World. Though a man, his son recalled, of “independent” means, he was,
it seems, poorer than his in- laws, who might have made him feel the disparity.
While the other members of the extended family began prospering, Jackson moved
his wife and two sons, Hugh and Robert, to Twelve Mile Creek, seven miles from
the heart of Waxhaw. His wife was pregnant when the first Andrew Jackson died
unexpectedly. It was a confusing, unsettling time. The baby was almost due, a
snowstorm-rare in the South-had struck, and Jackson’s pallbearers drank so much
as they carried his corpse from Twelve Mile Creek to the church for the funeral
that they briefly lost the body along the way.

Soon thereafter, on Sunday, March 15, 1767, Mrs. Jackson gave birth to her third
son, naming him Andrew after her late husband. He was a dependent from delivery
forward. Whether the birth took place in North or South Carolina has occupied
historians for generations (Jackson himself thought it was South Carolina), but
the more important fact is that Andrew Jackson came into the world under the
roof of relatives, not of his own parents. Growing up, he would be a guest of
the houses in which he lived, not a son, except of a loving mother who was never
the mistress of her own household. One of Mrs. Jackson’s sisters had married a
Crawford, and the Crawfords were more affluent than the Jacksons. The loss of
Mrs. Jackson’s husband only made the gulf wider. When the Crawfords asked Mrs.
Jackson and her sons to live with them, it was not wholly out of a sense of
familial devotion and duty. The Jacksons needed a home, the Crawfords needed
help, and a bargain was struck. “Mrs. Crawford was an invalid,” wrote James
Parton, the early Jackson biographer who interviewed people familiar with the
Jacksons’ days in Waxhaw, “and Mrs. Jackson was permanently established in the
family as housekeeper and poor relation.” Even in his mother’s lifetime, Jackson
felt a certain inferiority to and distance from others. “His childish
recollections were of humiliating dependence and galling discomfort, his poor
mother performing household drudgery in return for the niggardly maintenance of
herself and her children,” said Mary Donelson Wilcox, Emily and Andrew’s oldest
daughter. He was not quite part of the core of the world around him. He did not
fully belong, and he knew it.

God and war dominated his childhood. His mother took him and his brothers to the
Waxhaw Presbyterian meetinghouse for services every week, and the signal
intellectual feat of his early years was the memorization of the Shorter
Westminster Catechism. Most stories about the young Jackson also paint a
portrait of a child and young man full of energy, fun, and not a little fury.
Like many other children of the frontier, he was engaged in a kind of constant
brawl from birth-and in Jackson’s case, it was a brawl in which he could not
stand to lose ground or points, even for a moment.